Archive for June 6th, 2018

So this morning I saw a tweet come across the feed by RVAWonk that was proclaiming that the IRA was back with a new site and the fuckery was pretty much just naked on their part. In the article she goes over the salient technical details of the site and the accounts. It also has another nice linked post that does a bit more in that area as well and I recommend you all read that too. However, I took a bit of a deeper dive looking at the site itself and it’s coding as well as did some Maltego mapping of it and the Twitter account. My overall take on all of that is pretty much “meh” … What really intrigues me and has been bothering me for some time now is that everyone is busy mapping all this shit but the fact of the matter is that mapping does not stop the cognitive dissonance that the Russians are playing on to win this game.

The Russians here are basically at a point where they aren’t even trying to hide the fact that the site is a Russian propaganda/disinformation effort and this is the important fact we all seem to be missing in this community. This shit works and even though most people do not have the technical abilities to look deeper into the code and the domains, it is pretty plain when you look at the site itself where they use Cyrillic and Russian in their image names and such that it is in fact a Russian operation.

We will all likely go down the rabbit hole on the how many followers they have on Twitter and who they follow. We will collate all the data and sift it and parse it all to put out reports on how they did this. My problem though is that we can investigate the shit out of this all we want but unless we come up with strategies to deny, degrade, or destroy the content, it will reach those tribalists out there who want it and the damage of 2016 will continue on unabated. What’s even more galling here is that the Russians have basically pulled a Babe Ruth by announcing this site and putting it out there so flagrantly with cyrillic in it and on domains owned by a russian domain hosting service. In reality they just gave us the bird and we are now going to just have to sit by and watch as they inflame the Trumpists to hopefully affect the mid terms with this crap.

Of course maybe Twitter will catch on here and swat this account offline? You hear me Jack? … *tap tap* this thing on?

Oh well, so there’s a new site and it seems they have also employed an SEO in there as well. The site has a lot of means to track posts, likes, geolocations etc as well. I have mirrored the whole site and am still poking through the code. The SEO is a new old site too with an anonymous domain resister back in April of this year that likely is also the Russian’s doing as well. I am sure many of the community will keep an eye on it as we go along so someone will eventually write about this as well with rapt verbiage not really doing anything about the problem as well.

So here’s my thing, we are all spending all this time nattering on about it but what can we do to stop such propaganda sites and Twitter accounts from spreading the mind virus? If we cannot stop them, how can we innoculate the general public from the effects of such mental plagues? These are the questions we should be asking and I just don’t hear it happening. I know that it is a rich and difficult problem dealing with the psyche and cognitive dissonance but we really need to lay off all the techno babble and focus on real solutions. Solutions that conern the human animal, not the technology kids. The Russians already know this and they are leveraging it. I mean, how much more blatant do they have to be? How about they just post billboards now in Cyrillic for Trump in all those Trump states?